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Image by Joshua J. Cotten

Waiting

Too many birds fail to see the transparent glass. On this frigid day I hold the stunned female purple finch in my hands to warm her and then surround her with a paper towel hut, watching her catch up with herself as does her mate on a high branch. When I look back a little later she is gone, only to sit comfortably on the feeder the next few days.

 

                 

a little tuft

stuck to the window

winter sunlight

Image by Timothy Eberly

These Frozen Woods

The translucency of mind in these frozen woods. My steps follow the long-hardened footprints of others down this path. Not here just a few days ago, a tiny, desiccated snake curled into itself, almost a circle, flattened to the frozen snow. A step past it like a bonsai island set piece a foot high evergreen in the center of a small mound of pebbly earth surrounded by a perfect ring of black ice. With the wind circling from this point above me one hemlock creak after another fills the silence.

 

           

cold blue sky

almost seeing through

the full day moon

Published in  endless small waves, HMS press 2008

Bruce Ross.jpg

Bruce Ross is a past president of the Haiku Society of America. He has authored five collections of haiku and haibun, most recently the award-winning spring clouds   haiku (2012). He edited Haiku Moment, An Anthology of Contemporary North American Haiku (1993) and Journey to the Interior, American Versions of Haibun (1998), and is author of How to Haiku, A Writer’s Guide to Haiku and Related Forms (2002), updated in 2022 under the name Writing Haiku. He is the central editor of A Vast Sky, An Anthology of Contemporary World Haiku (2015), and of the online journal Autumn Moon Haiku Journal. His haiku, haibun, senryu, haiga, tanka, and renku and his reviews, essays, and translations appear in the world haiku journals. He is the owner and publisher of Tancho Press. Bruce lives in Maine, USA with his wife Astrid.

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